The Home Theater Recommended List

Thanksgiving was pretty normal this year. Woody did the fried turkey at his place, so the whole family converged over there. Joy/Rob didn’t come, but normally we don’t really get to see Rob during the winter, coaching gets in the way. There was a lot of food though, the turkey, mac & cheese, and collard greens were right on the money. I didn’t really like the sweet potato though, and other items were on par.

Renee got to see the Popcorn Hour in action at Mom and Dad’s and was fairly impressed. It’s a device you really have to be a video pirate to appreciate, but there isn’t a better device of its kind anywhere, except for maybe the newer model that does even more codecs. It definite deserves to be in a dream home theater setup if you have Computer content you want to view on a TV. The GUI is fairly bare, but its no worse than streaming from a PS3 or 360, and supports more formats without the need of a transcoder.

The real dilemma of any home theater I think is what content do you get on it. Sure everyone wants a big screen, and big sound, but what are you actually going to enjoy? As much as I’m a fan of Media Center, honestly the costs are a bit too high. Considering that a cable DVR can do more or less the same job at $15 per month my HTPC does at $2,000, there’s no debate which is the better value. Now sure I have much more space, more tuners, and a lot more features (it does Netflix, web browsing, gaming, supports every codec on the planet, and everything else you’d expect from a computer), I can see why someone might want to go with a compartmentalized solution, and have their cable DVR (or better yet a TiVO) as one of several devices in the chain. Even if you add all the devices together, your budget will be less than have a fully speced out CableCard HTPC. So if you want all the features, at a fraction of the cost, this is what I’d go with.

• Cable or Satellite provided DVR


• Roku NetFlix Box


• Panasonic DMP-BD35 Blu-Ray player + 1GB or more SD memory


• Popcorn Hour A-110


• Monoprice 4x1 HDMI switch (gotta connect it all)

Total comes out to $610 in equipment, and whatever your fee for cable/satellite and Netflix will be. Game consoles would change that. A PS3 negates the Blu-Ray player, but there are transcoding issues you’ll run into with Netflix stuff or downloaded computer stuff. Also not having any IR capability means you have to use a controller or buy an extra piece of equipment to use a regular IR remote. The 360 now does NetFlix natively, but you won’t have Blu-Ray, and the transcoding issues will still potentially be there for computer stuff. But if gaming isn’t a concern, that’s what I’d go with. I’d imagine that an Apple whore would replace the Popcorn Hour with an Apple TV, but if you aren’t trapped into their DRM scheme, I’d stay as far away from that device as human possible.

Sleepy

Personal note, I’ve had a hard time sleeping… Kind of effects me at work and afterward. Just don’t have the energy to do much of anything.

Digg is like the unofficial Obama website. I’m starting to tire of reading about every little thing McCain does stupid. It would be one thing if this was the Daily Show, and they are posing fun at him, but every little quip makes “Popular”, outside of any real perspective. If there was some BIG news, then it should be front page. But everything is front page, so there’s no differentiating and its getting tiresome. By November, I’m not going to care, and I imagine other people will be burned out too. In the end, having people being burned out in November is a bad thing.

That said, seeing McCain’s comeback in the poll is the perhaps the best reason to re-energize Obama. Regardless of however “typical politician” I think Obama is, I don’t think the country can handle 4 years of McCain 2008.

The ebay stuff is going well. Spent $160 on 11 blu-ray titles. It’s under the $20 average Amazon price which is good. Got another 14 blu-ray movies from Amazon that were on sale, and then picked up 6 more from CL. That should build up my Blu-Ray collection, so combined with the HD DVDs I should have a healthy High Def DVD Catalog. Just have to wait for everything to arrive now.


The Media Server’s Hard Drive situation is finally resolved. 3TB running now. I did decide to sell my old LCD monitor and am replacing it with a matching 2nd Dell LCD, also getting a 9600GT for dual DVI goodness. It’s amazing what $100 will buy now in terms of graphics power.

Home Theater Upgrade

Rehashed and updated my Home Theater setup. Go into the specifics below:











Panasonic 50PZ800U - HDTV
Onkyo TX-SR705 - AV Reciever
Dell XPS 420 - Home Theater PC
3 ATi Digital Cable Tuners
Sony BDP-S350 - Blu-Ray Player
Toshiba HD-A30 - HD DVD Player
Microsoft Xbox 360
Sony PS2
MonoPrice 5 Port HDMI Switch
4 Mission m73 Loud Speakers
Mission m71c1 Center Channel Speaker
B&W ASW650 Subwoofer
Home Built Media Server w\ 3TB of storage space
2 APC BackUps RS BR1500LCD
NetGear 8 Port Mini Switch
Vantec SATA Hard Drive Dock

The speakers, sub, game consoles, rack, TV stand, and Switches are old. But the rest of the equipment is either new or upgraded. I tuned my old HTPC into a glorified server, all the bittorrents and DVD library rips get saved there, but now there's more space. That said I'm having some growing pains with failing hard drives in the RAID array, but I hope everything will be ironed out in the next week.

All the video equipment is now 1080p, which meant a new TV, HD DVD player for my 38 HD DVDs, a Blu-Ray player, and a CableCard HTPC. The CableCard HTPC has 3 Tuners and 2TB of storage. Works great with FIOS, I would argue that videos on it look twice as good as they used to on my old TV. Replaced the old receiver for a new one that can decode TrueHD and DTS MA, so it works great with the Sony Blu-Ray player. Ultimately decided to go with a standalone player for that bitstreaming support of TrueHD and DTS MA, and all I can say is wow.

It took a bit to get to get the CableCard HTPC to play everything right from within Media Center, but thanks to some help from thegreenbutton.com, I got it all worked out. Codec packs work pretty well for Media Player Classic, but not so much with Media Center. Below is what I use.

FFDShow Tryouts Beta 3 (later builds have issues with VMC)
DirectVobSub for subtitles
Haali Media Splitter for mkv
QT Lite for QuickTime support

For 5.1 SPDIF support I:
-Set DTS and AC3 to SPDIF in FFDshow Audio Properties
-Followed these steps to get 2.0 and 5.1 AAC audio to play

Plays well with the extender in the bedroom, as well with the DRMed CableCard recordings. Earlier with other codec mixes I had random instability, but not this is fairly stable. I did give up on my HD HomeRun. I dropped the HD HomeRun in favor of a 3rd ATi Digital Cable Tuner. While there's a net loss of 1 tuner, I get 100's of channels from the DCT, where the HD HomeRun gives me only 13 or so because of encryption from FIOS.

One of the nicer features about CableCard's DRM is that it does at least work with any Media Center extender out of the box. While extenders otherwise have poor codec support, right now I use a Popcorn Hour for all the AC3 content, ripped DVDs, and mkvs that Media Center Extenders do not play, while the extender can do the CableCard recordings. Both devices can do basic xvid/mp3 avi's well. Only thing right now a Popcorn Hour cannot play is a mkv with Ogg Vorbis audio. Too bad Golgo 13 uses that.

I didn't realize this, but the only HD DVD players that bitstream TrueHD and DTS MA are the high end players such as the A35. The mid range and low range players do not, which is disappointing. Well, since I won't be buying any more HD DVDs, I guess it doesn't matter. Paying $60 for a used player on ebay was a better deal than rebuying a bunch of movies. I'm trying to fill up my Blu-Ray collection with used Blu-Rays to save a little money.

Looking forward to the FIOS upgrade on 8/13 when FIOS will add a lot of new HD channels to everyone in Richmond.